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2011 Book #5: Good Morning, Midnight

Tuesday, 10 July 2012 10:29 Lindsay Attaway Adult Blog

I've been wanting to read Good Morning, Midnight for a long time. Years ago, I randomly picked up another Jean Rhys novel, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (which doesn't have a Wikipedia page!), and I really liked it. Later, I was assigned Wide Sargasso Sea, which, it turns out, is a sort-of prequel to Jane Eyre, for a modern fiction class. I liked that one too, though at the time I hadn't read Jane Eyre, and when I finally did, I was kind of disappointed in the fire part.

Anyway, back to the current novel. It's about the Loneliest Woman on Earth living in Paris, and it's Very Modernist. The woman, who calls herself Sasha, lives off money from friends and former lovers, as she seems emotionally incapable of any sort of work, though she tries a couple of times. She thinks everyone in Paris dislikes her, thinks something is wrong with her, and she tries her best to be alone and avoid their critical eyes. And, of course, things happen. She goes back to London for a time and falls in love with Enno, who is at times very loving and at others emotionally abusive. She marries him and has a baby who dies shortly after birth. Enno leaves. Sasha becomes more and more depressed, eventually slipping into a sort of drunken madness.

This novel surprised me because of what there wasn't. Several people told me that it's really disturbing, and I didn't find it that way. Nobody ends up dead. What did disturb me, though, was how much I identify with Sasha. Okay, not currently, thank God, but when I was younger. If I had lived alone in 1930s Paris, leaving what friends or family I had behind in England, the same things would have gone through my mind, and my life might have been a lot like hers. After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie is a similar novel, though its protagonist isn't so terrifically lonely. I guess I just tend to identify with Jean Rhys's characters, and that's why I like her so much.

2011 Book #7: Oryx and Crake

Tuesday, 10 July 2012 10:24 Lindsay Attaway Adult Blog

I really enjoyed Oryx and Crake . It's a dystopian, post-apocalyptic-type novel about one of the few men left on Earth. He calls himself Snowman, and the plot bounces back and forth between him and the man he used to be, before the catastrophe, Jimmy. This part is set in the near-future, where everything is genetically spliced together - food, animals, medicine, etc. Jimmy and Crake had been good friends since they were kids. Crake was really intelligent. They grew up, and Crake worked on what he claimed would cure all of the problems caused by humanity. Then Things Happen. Snowman survives with Crake's humanish creations, called Crakers, who think Crake is a god and Snowman is almost one. Then there's Oryx, who might or might not have been sold as a slave into the sex industry when she was a child and who is revered as a near-god, too.

I tend to like dystopian novels. I read Atwood's most famous novel, The Handmaid's Tale, when I was fifteen or so, and I liked it so much I even remember some of it. I've noted before that I rarely remember what books are about after a few years. I think 1984 was the first dystopian novel I ever read: my high school freshman English teacher assigned it, and I actually finished reading it. Another feat.

I bought Oryx and Crake in 2003 when it was first published. I tried reading it but lost interest after the first chapter or so. I don't know why: this time, I had a hard time putting it down. I ordered The Year of the Flood , the events of which are contemporaneous to Oryx and Crake, from Amazon, but I think I'll save that for later.

Oryx and Crake really sucked me in - moreso than most novels do. It's the usual dystopian warning of sorts, but it's not preachy. I'm not sure of a comparison - maybe a not-so-grim On the Beach. I really like Atwood's writing style: it's very easy to read, though I guess I'm comparing it to the two dialecty novels I just finished reading. I'm really looking forward to the sequel.

2011 Book #8: The Satanic Verses

Tuesday, 10 July 2012 10:22 Lindsay Attaway Adult Blog

Well, I finished it. I guess all it took was my public realization that I might not finish it to get me reading again. Note that I wrote that post yesterday and still had about halfway to go. I've done a good bit of reading over the past couple days.

The Satanic Verses is a long, hard read. Very long, very hard. My main problem with it is the plot is overly convoluted: I'm not quite sure about what exactly happened, and while I'd like to read it again to put it together, I know I won't. I won't be running back to Rushdie anytime soon, either. It's not really what I expected, kind of like One Hundred Years of Solitude wasn't. And the two novels have more in common: they're both examples of magical realism, though Marquez's novel is much more convincing. And, in general, better.

If you want a thorough rundown of the plot of The Satanic Verses, I'll direct you to Wikipedia because I couldn't do it without writing much more than the short blog post I've planned. Rushdie's novel consists of two-and-a-half storylines involving Bollywood actors Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, a plane crash, one turning into a goat, and one developing paranoid schizophrenia and possibly being, at some point, the Archangel Gabriel. And that's only one of the plotlines. It ends up really confusing.

It's not that it's a bad novel: it's just not as good as some people say it is. I have a feeling that a lot of people with strong opinions about it haven't read it. I can totally see why Khomeini issued a fatwa to kill Rushdie: The Satanic Verses is fabulously blasphemous.

In Rushdie's defense, the language is nice - even beautiful in some places. Here's my favorite part:

The landscape of his poetry was still the desert, the shifting dunes with the plumes of white sand blowing from their peaks. Soft mountains, uncompleted journeys, the impermanence of tents. How did one map a country that blew into a new form every day?

And that's about all I have to say about it. I didn't really like it, though I didn't hate it either. I might reread it someday and get more out of it: I have a feeling that if I did read it again, I'd like it more. Maybe an abridged version would suit me better, though.

2011 Book #9: The Hunger Games

Tuesday, 10 July 2012 10:19 Lindsay Attaway Adult Blog

Well, The Hunger Games is certainly a quick read. It's the first kids' book I've read in a while, and I liked it well enough. Suzanne Collins isn't an especially good writer - it's purely pop fiction like Dan Brown and all those other authors I usually can't bring myself to read. That said, I was entertained, which I guess, is the point of novels like this.

The Hunger Games is a dystopian novel set in an Oceania of the United States. There was a war between the capitol and thirteen districts after a rebellion, and the capitol won. Each year, to punish the districts, two kids between twelve and eighteen are chosen to compete in the Hunger Games. They're put into an arena and forced to survive in the wilderness as they kill each other off. The one who kills all the others wins. The two main characters, Katniss and Peeta, both from District 12, survive and fight and all that. It's violent and gory at times. It ends ambiguously, halfway making me want to pick up the trilogy's second book immediately to find out what happens.

But I won't because it's really not that good of a novel. And I hate novels that end with cliffhangers. I think that one reason I liked the Harry Potter series is that Rowling provides a relatively neat ending - except in the sixth book, and I remember being frustrated because the seventh was a year away. I think Philip Pullman tidies things up a bit more at the ends of the His Dark Materials books, too. And Ursula LeGuin with the Earthsea trilogy. The City of Ember series is a little better about it than The Hunger Games. I consider Lord of the Rings to be one giant novel, so the same standard doesn't apply. I like what Terry Pratchett does with his Discworld novels: each is on its own, but there are enough recurring characters and places that it's still a series. But that's neither here nor there.

I knew The Hunger Games wouldn't be particularly good early on. Or, at least, not particularly well-written. I tend to judge writing style by how authors describe their characters. If it's a crappy novel, it might go something like this:

I knew my brother would turn into a panther before he did. As I drove to the remote crossroads community of Hotshot, my brother watched the sunset in silence. Jason was dressed in old clothes, and he had a plastic Wal-Mart bag containing a few things he might need - toothbrush, clean underwear. He hunched inside his bulky camo jacket, looking straight ahead. His face was tense with the need to control his fear and his excitement.

In case you're wondering, that's the opening paragraph of Charlaine Harris's Dead as a Doornail , one of the books in her Sookie Stackhouse novels and of True Blood fame. I got through maybe ten pages of it and decided I'd be incapable of reading it. I was lucky enough to be surrounded by like-minded friends, and we passed it around, reading random passages aloud. A good time was had by all.

Anyway, good authors tend to do things a little differently. Being a good English major, I should root around and find an example, but being lazy, I'm not going to. Think about Faulkner - or even Rowling: would you ever see a description like that? Of course not. I didn't have to wait long, though, for Collins to disappoint:

I watch as Gale pulls out his knife and slices the bread. He could be my brother. Straight black hair, olive skin; we even have the same grey eyes. But we're not related, at least not closely. Most of the families who work the mines resemble one another this way. That's why my mother and Prim, with their light hair and blue eyes, always look out of place.

Urgh. I will give Collins credit here: her writing gets a bit better as the novel progresses, and I can't think of another instance when I was that irritated. Descriptions like that make me think of bad romance novels - of which I've only read half of two because the writing is so horrid.

To sum things up: The Hunger Games isn't a terrible novel, though it's not that good, either. The plot is interesting, but the style is mediocre at best. I might pick up the others, or I might not. I'd put my money on the latter.

2011 Book #10: Popular Hits of the Showa Era

Tuesday, 10 July 2012 10:18 Lindsay Attaway Adult Blog

I really liked Popular Hits of the Showa Era. It's short and a very quick read, and that's exactly what I was looking for. It's also fast-paced and seemed more like a long short-story than a book. Murakami doesn't waste time with in-depth descriptions but still gives the reader enough information to enter the world of the book.

It's about two groups of six. One is six guys in their late twenties who are bored and numb in a very postmodern way. The other is a group of unmarried women in their late thirties called Oba-sans. They all enjoy karaoke, and the guys have made up a party ritual of sorts in which they determine who dresses up and sings through games of rock-paper-scissors, and whoever loses drives them to a secluded part of the beach where they videotape performances. The parties get progressively weirder and creepier. One day, one of them randomly (and violently) kills one of the Oba-sans. The Oba-sans figure out who he is and kill him (also violently). Then there's an all-out war between the two groups with increasingly sophisticated weapons. The last battle-of-sorts is really interesting, but I won't ruin the novel for you.

Popular Hits of the Showa Era is really, really violent and gory. It's what I'd expect from Ryu Murakami after Coin Locker Babies, the only novel of his I've read. And I'm not sure I even finished it. Actually, that's not true. I read In the Miso Soup , but I don't remember anything about it. That was my introduction to him. Popular Hits is as light a read as a book about murder can be. I think, though, that I won't remember anything about it a year from now because it seems forgettable. Not that it's bad: it's just not that great, either. I gave it four stars on Goodreads because I enjoyed the process of reading it, but I don't have much to say about it. It's certainly not a "deep" book, and I think I might have liked it so much because that's exactly the kind of book I needed to read.

2011 Book #11: Labyrinths

Tuesday, 10 July 2012 10:15 Lindsay Attaway Adult Blog

Borges makes my brain hurt. Labyrinths was a really difficult read. It reminds me a lot of Italo Calvino, especially Invisible Cities. Evidently, Calvino was heavily influenced by Borges. Labyrinths is a collection of short stories, essays, and parables. I really enjoyed some of the short stories, but lots of the lost me because I don't remember enough about philosophy or what philosopher said what. At a certain point in several stories, I had to turn my brain off and go with it Tao-style. That said, I even liked some of those.

My favorite story is "The Immortal," which is about a man's journey to find The City of Immortals. He enters their city, which has been abandoned and is like a massive labyrinth. He discovers them after he leaves lying, waif-like outside its walls. They have stopped talking because there's nothing left to talk about, but he eventually gets one of them to start, and it turns out he's Homer. "The Immortal" is one of the longer stories, and after the plot extinguishes itself, it becomes more like a philosophical essay. I really enjoyed it. I also liked "The House of Asterion" and "The Library of Babel." I'd been told that "Emma Zunz" is best, and, while it's probably the most easily accessible in the collection, I found it unrewarding. Enough for the short stories.

I found the essays much easier to read and surprisingly interesting. Borges is a fan of Don Quixote, so he mentions it several times, and one of the essays is about it. "The Wall and the Books" is my favorite, but I've already written about that one. Many of the essays are about time and whether it exists or not. Five years ago, I'd have been excited about them, but I'm over it. I've read that kind of theory before. (If you want to read a novel about theories of time, read Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams, which is fantastic.) I don't really have much to say about the essays because I kind of sped through them.

The parables are my favorite part of Labyrinths. They're very short, but they also made me think. Borges discusses the same ideas in the parables as he does in the rest of the book, but the parables are much more accessible, which is probably why I liked them so much. Here's the first one:

Inferno, 1, 32

From the twilight of day till the twilight of evening, a leopard, in the last years of the thirteenth century, would see some wooden planks, some vertical iron bars, men and women who changed, a wall and perhaps a stone gutter filled with dry leaves. He did not know, could not know, that he longed for love and cruelty and the hot pleasure of tearing things to pieces and the wind carrying the scent of a deer, but something suffocated and rebelled within him and God spoke to him in a dream: "You live and will die in this prison so that a man I know of may see you a certain number of times and not forget you and place your figure and symbol in a poem which has its precise place in the scheme of the universe. You suffer captivity, but you will have given a word to the poem." God, in the dream, illumined the animal's brutishness and the animal understood these reasons and accepted his destiny, but, when he awoke, there was in him only an obscure resignation, a valorous ignorance, for the machinery of the world is much too complex for the simplicity of a beast. Years later, Dante was dying in Ravenna, as unjustified and as lonely as any other man. In a dream, God declared to him the secret purpose of his life and work; Dante, in wonderment, knew at last who and what he was and blessed the bitterness of his life. Tradition relates that, upon waking, he felt that he had received and lost an infinite thing, something he would not be able to recuperate or even glimpse, for the machinery of the world is much too complex for the simplicity of men.

If you're going to read any of Labyrinths, check out the parables. They're beautiful and undeniably brilliant.

I'd never read any Borges until now. I'd heard his name associated with Calvino and Lightman, so I figured I'd probably like it. Labyrinths was a harder read than I'd expected, and I had a hard time getting through it, but it was immensely rewarding. Borges is like T.S. Eliot and Yeats in that he draws the whole of history into a very short form, and I can see how he's a poet at heart.

Borges was also a librarian.

2011 Book #12: Catching Fire

Tuesday, 10 July 2012 10:13 Lindsay Attaway Adult Blog

Okay, I was wrong. I said I probably wouldn't bother reading Catching Fire, the sequel to The Hunger Games. In my defense, Borges made my brain hurt, and I needed some serious leisure reading. This one certainly qualifies.

If you haven't read these books and think you might like to, you should probably stop here. My guess is that if you're reading this blog, this series probably isn't on your list.

So. In The Hunger Games, Katniss won, but the dictator interpreted the way she did it as an act of rebellion, and so did the twelve districts, so uprisings began. (To catch up on the first book, read this post or check out the Wikipedia summary, which, I'm sure, is better than my halfhearted attempt.) The dictator and the Capitol start treating the residents of the districts even worse, and Katniss has become a symbol of the rebellion. The next Hunger Games are coming up, and they're the seventy-fifth. Every twenty-fifth Hunger Games is called the Quarter Quell and is especially nasty. This time the districts are forced to choose their tributes among previous victors, and Katniss and Peeta, the tributes from The Hunger Games, are thrust into the arena again. And we get to read about another year of Hunger Games. Then, things happen, and Katniss is rescued (the Capitol got Peeta, but I'm assuming he's probably not dead), and she learns about the rebellion that's been going on during the Games. The End.

Catching Fire is basically a repeat of The Hunger Games. It has the same general structure, the same general characters, and basically the same ending. The style didn't bother me as much this time, but I'm not sure if it's because it got better or because I realized I'm reading for the plot, so the style is good enough if I can stand it.

I think that Collins's choice of writing these novels in the first person is a misstep. Sure, it adds immediacy (they're also in present tense), but we know, from the outset, especially since there are sequels, that Katniss has to win or, at least, survive. That idea bothered me more in Catching Fire because it's so repetitious.

It's also ridiculously predictable for other reasons. Besides the first-person POV, Collins is over-the-top with clues about what's really going on, even for a book aimed at seventh graders (Wait. Why am I reading this again?).

Despite its flaws, though, I enjoyed it. It's the kind of book I needed after Borges, and I know I'm kidding myself if I don't think I'll read the third one. I even have Mockingjay on my Kindle. The plot is good enough to hold my attention, and, hey, it only took me a couple days to read. I haven't decided whether to read the next one immediately or to put a few books in between. I'm kind of in the mood for another crack at Garcia Marquez.

2011 Book #13: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Tuesday, 10 July 2012 10:11 Lindsay Attaway Adult Blog

I liked Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? much more than I thought I would, though I don't have too much to say about it. It's about the difference (or lack of) between real humans and animals and electronic, man-made androids and animals. It's a really interesting read: I couldn't put it down. This morning, I had at least half of it left to read. I went to Starbucks (as usual) planning to do some GRE work along with the reading, but I simply couldn't stop. I read through the rest of the novel in two or three hours. This is one of those books that I'll remember more like a movie than a book, though I'll probably barely remember that I read it at all in a couple years.

This novel isn't my first Philip K. Dick experience. I tried reading The Man in the High Castle a few years ago, but I got bored not far into it, and I quit. He's the kind of novelist I should like more than I do. It took me quite a while to get into Electric Sheep, and I'm wondering if I would have liked The Man in the High Castle if I'd been a bit more patient. But patience isn't my strong suit.

A side note: I think I'm becoming more fond of reading books on my Kindle than reading the real thing. More on that later.

2011 Book #14: Disgrace

Tuesday, 10 July 2012 10:10 Lindsay Attaway Adult Blog

J.M. Coetzee has been following me around. I hadn't heard of him until relatively recently, and then his name started popping up everywhere. Book-related everywheres, anyway. So when I happened to pick up Disgrace and read the blurb, I decided to give it a try, recalling how much I've liked South African lit in the past. And it was good. At the very least, it was a nice break from the intensity of books like The Hunger Games and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.

Disgrace is about different kinds of disgrace and how people deal with it and try to move on. David Lurie (who reminds me of Tomas in The Unbearable Lightness of Being), a Romantic poetry professor, has an affair with the student and gets in trouble. He refuses to cooperate with the university committee dealing with his case, and he is dismissed. He goes to visit his daughter, who lives on a farm in the country, a very unsafe place in recently post-Apartheid South Africa. One day, as she and David return home from a walk, they are robbed, and she is raped by three people. She refuses to report the rape and deals with it by herself, her own form of disgrace. David deals with it, too. There are, of course, a few subplots, one of which involves a veterinary clinic with the basic purpose of euthanizing dogs from which David learns to deal with his own disgrace.

Oprah should be all over this one. As I said, it reeks of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I didn't like, though it's not so preachy. Coetzee has his Kundera moments in which he philosophizes a bit excessively, but at least he keeps it in the mind of the protagonist rather than doing the moralizing himself.

My favorite part of the novel, and what will keep me reading Coetzee, is the prose style. It's beautiful. It also makes for easy reading: I think I started Disgrace this time yesterday.

2011 Book #15: Mockingjay

Tuesday, 10 July 2012 10:07 Lindsay Attaway Adult Blog

I think I've said all I want to about the Hunger Games trilogy. Mockingjay was just like the other two, but this time, instead of ending with a cliffhanger, it just ended. Think about the end of Harry Potter, the summing up several years in the future, but badly. In Harry Potter, I think such an ending was a good choice and provided closure at the end of an absorbing series that many kids had grown up with. Sticking an ending like that on a series like the Hunger Games was kind of pointless and dumb. Just sayin'.

All three books were quick reads, and they were entertaining enough. Mockingjay is my least favorite because, by this point, the reader knows exactly what is going to happen. It's entirely predictable. Collins even includes another trip to the Hunger Games - of sorts. The format is exactly the same as the other two, and so is the style. I got bored pretty quickly, and I'm glad I've gotten these books out of my system. That said, I did enjoy them well enough.

2011 Book #16: Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Tuesday, 10 July 2012 10:04 Lindsay Attaway Adult Blog

Chronicle of a Death Foretold is short, and I guess that's my only real complaint. It's similar, in a lot of ways, to One Hundred Years of Solitude, minus the vast epicness, which is my favorite thing about that novel. I'm not saying that means I didn't like this one.

It's a novel(la?) spiraling around Santiago Nasar, who is killed by two brothers defending their sister's honor. As the story progresses, we learn more and more about the circumstances and how everyone in town knew exactly what was going to happen but did nothing to prevent it for various reasons. Angela Vicario, just married hours before, is returned to her parents' home after her new husband discovs that she's not a virgi. When asked, she says Santiago Nasar took her virginity, so her brothers want to kill him. Marquez is never clear about whether he actually did or not.

Again, it's short, though I don't see how a novel like this could be very long, and if it was, it would be tiring. I miss the world of One Hundred Years of Solitude, though I know every Marquez novel can't rehash that one. He did mention a couple characters from it, though, for all I know, they could be actual historical figures. I know exactly zero about Colombian history. I do know that I'm looking forward to reading more Marquez. I'm spacing him out, though, like Murakami, especially since he's quit writing.

2011 Book #17: Crime and Punishment

Tuesday, 10 July 2012 10:01 Lindsay Attaway Adult Blog

So. I read Crime and Punishment and liked it, though not as much as I thought I would when I was halfway through. At one point, I thought it might trump One Hundred Years of Solitude, but it didn't. I'm not going to summarize it here because everyone is familiar with it. The funny thing is that I had no idea how it ends. I knew, going in, that Raskolnikov kills someone and then suffers because of it. I didn't know that he, in fact, kills two people, though the second person, I guess, doesn't really matter.

My only problem with the novel is the end. I was disappointed that it ends relatively happily under the circumstances, that Raskolnikov sees the light, so to speak. It's hopeful. I'd braced myself for a depressing, pessimistic ending, and I was disappointed because it wasn't the life-changing end I'd expected. Crime and Punishment is, after all, considered one of the best novels ever written. My expectations, I guess, were too high.

This novel got me to thinking, though. The main reason I'd never read it is that I wasn't assigned it in college. Granted, I don't think I ever took a class that involved Russian lit of any sort, beyond a modern lit class in grad school, and even then it was Notes from Underground, which is very short. Professors don't assign long novels anymore. I've heard many times things like "I assigned such-and-such, but I'd have assigned such-and-such instead because it's better, but it's sooooo long." I think My Antonia, The Well of Loneliness, and Orlando might have been the longest novels I had to read in college, and they're all significantly shorter than Crime and Punishment. And the same professor assigned all of those novels.

I often feel shorted in my English degree, though UNO had a really good English department back in the day. And I'm not sure I'd have read a long novel if I was assigned one, though I think I read all of those three. I don't think I got all the way through Orlando, though I put in a good effort. It sucks that professors have become so cynical that they assume students won't read long assignments. Not that students help, of course. I read my share of Cliff's Notes.

As disappointed as I was in Crime and Punishment, (and, to tell the truth, I wasn't all that disappointed) I can easily recognize that it's a Great Novel and that anyone with a lit degree should have read it. I remember a professor assigning a short Dickens selection and claiming that a whole Dickens novel would be too much. I read A Tale of Two Cities right after I graduated and was angry that I hadn't read it earlier. I have too many holes in my English degree, and I think it's because professors are caving in to students' laziness. I slipped through college with mostly As and didn't do a quarter of the work I should have had to do to get them, and now I regret it. And I went to a good school. Sometimes I'm amazed that LSUS English graduates are even literate.

2011 Book #18: The Grapes of Wrath

Tuesday, 10 July 2012 09:58 Lindsay Attaway Adult Blog

I usually make myself write these blog posts within hours of finishing the book so I don't forget what I want to say about them. Except I finished reading The Grapes of Wrath a couple of days ago, so I don't have as much to talk about.

I really loved this novel. It's the most beautiful English I've read in a long, long time. Here's the first paragraph:

To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. The plows crossed and recrossed the rivulet marks. The last rains lifted the corn quickly and scattered weed colonies and grass along the sides of the roads so that the gray country and the dark red country began to disappear under green cover. In the last part of May the sky grew pale and the clouds that had hung in high puffs for so long in the spring were dissipated. The sun flared down on the growing corn day after day until a line of brown spread along the edge of each green bayonet. The clouds appeared, and went away, and in a while they did not try any more. The weeds grew darker green to protect themselves, and they did not spread any more. The surface of the earth crusted, a thin hard crust, and as the sky became pale, so the earth became pale, pink in the red country and white in the gray country.

After I read that paragraph, I knew I'd be able to get through this novel. Whole (short) chapters like these are interspersed with the actual plot.

As with Crime and Punishment, this book is so widely read that it has its own Cliff's Notes, so I'm not going to bother with a real summary. It's basically about a family from Oklahoma who gets forced out of their house during the Depression and the Dust Bowl, moves to California (with all the other farmers), and tries to survive. It's sad but soooo rewarding. I had a hard time not crying.

I've read two other Steinbeck novels: Travels with Charley and Of Mice and Men. The former was required reading before my senior year of high school, which was a looong time ago, and all I really remember about it is that I liked it. I read Of Mice and Men a couple of years ago, and I liked that one, too. The language, though isn't what stuck out for me about those novels - okay, I don't remember enough about Travels with Charlie to make that statement fairly. Both are very short novels, and I think Steinbeck might work best with a longer form.

The other day, my mom asked me what I was reading, and when I told her, she said that she liked it and that it was sad. I said, "Wait. You've read The Grapes of Wrath?" I really wasn't expecting that. I guess she read it in high school or college. Which brings me back to my earlier point on professors not assigning long books anymore. This novel is the kind you assign to make people love literature and language. Sure, Of Mice and Men is great, but I've found it hard to get absorbed in a short book, and I think most authors do best when they have some space to dig in their roots.

Until very recently, I haven't been a fan of long books. I've always had an attention span issue, and I'd lose interest after a couple of days or a couple hundred pages. And I think the shorter books I've always been assigned is what made the difference. The syllabus, for instance, would you have five days to read The Awakening (it's very short), and then we'll discuss it for one (maybe two!) class periods. That's not what college should be. Isn't the point to learn to analyze and write about literature? How are you supposed to do that when you never really get into anything beyond surface level? It's impossible if you're only discussing it for an hour. Reading longer books for my 50-Books-in-a-Year challenge has totally changed my mind about this stuff. Professors are pressured to fit a ton of stuff into their syllabi, and it's the students who are suffering. It's become quantity over quality (Must Prepare for the Lit GRE!), so it's no wonder universities are churning out English majors who are barely even literate.

BONUS (I couldn't help myself):

2011 Book #19: Brideshead Revisited

Tuesday, 10 July 2012 09:54 Lindsay Attaway Adult Blog

I enjoyed Brideshead Revisited sooooo much more than I thought I would. In fact, I think it's one of my favorite books ever. Evelyn Waugh has a lot in common with Fitzgerald and Hemingway, though it was published twenty years after The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises. Brideshead Revisited is about wealthy English families between the World Wars. In college, Charles Ryder befriends Sebastian Flyte, and they run around together. Then Charles becomes involved in Sebastian's family, and due to a flaw, of sorts, in Sebastian's character, bad things begin to happen, and they part ways. But Charles can't shake the Flyte family, and we hear about what happens to them through the rest of the novel while Sebastian remains on the periphery. It's really depressing, though not in the family-loses-its-money-etc-etc way that you might expect. The characters are empty and remain so. No one is happy for long.

Dismal.

Though, again, it's up there with my favorite novels. I spent a long time reading this one because I didn't want to leave it. I liked the atmosphere. At the end, I found myself in a daze like I did with For Whom the Bell Tolls, when I felt like I was in the mountains of Spain during their Civil War for a few hours after.

Before this novel, I didn't know much about Waugh, and I guess I still don't. I most clearly associate him with my chronic confusion over his gender: I've embarrassed myself several times calling him "she". In my defense, though, Evelyn is a pretty girly name. I also don't understand why he's not taught in universities. I have an English degree, and I feel like I should have at least heard of him while I was in college. At least for GRE purposes.

I'll certainly be reading more Waugh in the near future. A Handful of Dust is probably next. It's funny: sometimes I use a site called The Book Explorer for recommendations, and the list for Brideshead Revisited includes several of my favorite novels. One Hundred Years of Solitude, my Very Favorite Book, is at the top. I wish I'd been introduced to Waugh much earlier.

2011 Book #20: The Blue Sword

Tuesday, 10 July 2012 09:48 Lindsay Attaway Adult Blog

The Blue Sword seems much longer than it is. It's a kids' book that doesn't read like a kids' book. In fact, I'm kind of confused about why it's even in the juvenile section of the library rather than, at least, the young adult section. Maybe it was the style that made me read it so slowly. Surprising longness aside, I really liked it. Robin McKinley is good at creating a whole world in a relatively short space.

The novel is about a girl from a normal-ish world who is thrust into a magical one in which she must learn to function and thrive. Corlath, king of the Hillfolk and guided by some kind of hereditary magic, kidnaps the girl, Harry, and takes her into the hills, which are threatened by the Northerners, who aren't quite human. Turns out Harry is good at riding horses and fighting, and she has some of the magic, too. They eventually fight the Northerners. Things are more complicated than that, of course.

I read The Blue Sword because it's one of Palmer's favorite kid-books, and, though he doesn't seem to be too fond of them anymore (Harry Potter is a kids' novel!), I see how he liked this one. It's really engrossing. It's one of those I'll confuse with a movie. There was some confusion as to which Robin McKinley novel was actually his favorite. There's a prequel to this one called The Hero and the Crown, but it was written after this one. It was supposedly going to be a whole series, but I guess that didn't pan out. She talks a bit about it on her webpage:

The bottom line is, it isn't my choice. You don't write stories like you might build a bookcase. You don't get up in the morning, decide that you're going to put seven chapters together to make a novel, whip out your tape measure and decide how many words, order the paper by the square foot from the office supply shop, sit down and start stamping the pages with black ink in a quantifiable pattern, and polish off the rough edges with a sander at the end. It's not up to you. You write what you are given to write, and you just go on hoping you will go on receiving those gifts. Damar hasn't seen fit to oblige me to write about it lately.

All of this, of course, seems like corny crap to me. It's funny how a photo of an author will immediately bias me for or against him or her. Robin McKinley reminds me of one of my high school teachers. It's actually kind of creepy. She also loooooves horses. The author blurb on the back flap of the first edition of The Blue Sword says that "Robin McKinley lives at present on a horse farm in eastern Massachusetts where she divides her time between the fascinating occupants of the barn in the mornings and the tyranny of her typewriter in the afternoons." She totally wrote that herself. What matters, though, is that I enjoyed her novel, and I'll be reading the next one in the near future. I like to put a couple unrelated books between ones in a series.

2011 Book #21: The Year of the Flood

Tuesday, 10 July 2012 09:46 Lindsay Attaway Adult Blog

The Year of the Flood isn't really a sequel to Oryx and Crake like I expected it to be. The two novels' events happen at the same time: the plots and characters are interwoven. The Year of the Flood is narrated by two of these characters, Toby and Ren. They're both part of an environmentalist group called God's Gardeners. The novel jumps around in time between Year One, when the God's Gardeners first organize, and Year Twenty-Five, when the Waterless Flood knocks out most humans. The Waterless Flood is the virus Crake intentionally spreads in the first novel. Then Things Happen, as they did in Oryx and Crake. We hear a bit more about what happens at the end of the first novel, though not much. Many of the characters in The Year of the Flood are minor characters in Oryx and Crake, and vice-versa, which makes it interesting.

I think I liked The Year of the Flood more than Oryx and Crake, though that one was good, too. I gave this one four stars on Goodreads because, unlike Oryx, it's really preachy. Explicitly so, even. The way Atwood does it, though, isn't annoying, at least for the most part. Adam One, founder of the God's Gardeners, gives sermons of sorts, followed by poems Atwood says were inspired by William Blake's poetry. You can listen to some of them here. They're super-corny.

I explained my past with Margaret Atwood in my Oryx and Crake post, so I won't talk about it again. These books, though, have reminded me of how much I enjoy her stories and her writing style, so I'll revisit her novels soon, though only after some DeLillo because I've given myself a stern talking-to about the Thesis Monster situation, and I have to get to work.

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